Moving Them Elsewhere: Police as Influencers & Implementers in Homeless Policy

• In Event: All Public Health Is Local: Local Politics and the Dynamics of Public Health

Abstract

Policy choices profoundly shape the well-being of America’s unhoused population. Fragmented political institutions hinder America’s federal, state, and local governments from effectively addressing homelessness. Housing, mental health, and addiction policies can ameliorate the conditions facing homeless people--or exacerbate them. As a consequence, many policymakers and advocates endorse harm-reduction, rather than more punitive approaches to homelessness that have been shown to facilitate cycles of homelessness. Indeed, given their potential to address homelessness, it is unsurprising that the bulk of prior studies have centered on these important health policy areas. While these accounts illuminate important facets of the politics of homelessness, they largely miss a critical government institution whose more hidden policymaking may alter the lives of people experiencing homelessness: the police.
This paper thus explores an additional–and understudied–policy arena that may profoundly shape the well-being of homeless people: the police. We investigate the extent to which policing is a significant approach to homeless. To do so, we employ a multifaceted methodological approach featuring novel elite survey data and the quantitative analysis of 311 and policing data. We descriptively explore how involved the police are in making homelessness policy and examine the mechanisms by which this occurs.
Our findings illustrate that, despite scant scholarly and policy attention, policing is an important and understudied approach to homelessness; local governments across the country rely on their police as implementers of both punitive and harm reduction policies. They are driven, at least in part, by citizen complaints. Police are important promulgators of homelessness policy, leading to more punitive state interactions for America’s unhoused.

Authors

• Katherine Levine Einstein, Boston University

• Charley Ellen Willison, Cornell University